News & analysis of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, by Matthew Stiegler

Two new opinions

Today the Third Circuit granted a motion to publish a previously unpublished opinion. Interestingly, the motion was filed by amici, not by a party. The non-published opinion had been authored by Judge Vanaskie, who has since retired, so the motion to publish was granted by the other two panel members and the opinion was issued as an unsigned per curiam.

The appeal arose from a suit brought under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, in which a boy and his parents alleged that a school district’s refusal to enroll the boy was illegal. In a previous suit between the parents and the district, the school had agreed to pay for the boy to go to a different school for one year, and the parents agreed to waive prior and also agreed to make no future McKinney-Vento claims. The court today held that the future-claim waiver was unenforceable for lack of consideration in light of a recitation of consideration in the settlement agreement which only referred to the prior claims, which strikes me as debatable. The court also rejected the district’s argument that the student was not homeless because he was living along with his family in his grandparents’ house for several years, given statutory language included as homeless children living doubled up with no durational limit.

The panel was Ambro and Jordan (and originally included Vanaskie). Arguing counsel were Katherine Meehan of Raffaele Puppio for the district and Michael Raffaele of Kershenbaum & Raffaele for the student and parents.

The Third Circuit held that the government’s warrantless use of cell-site location data violated the Fourth Amendment, reversing its prior ruling on that point in this case (captioned US v. Stimler, link here) in light of the Supreme Court’s intervening ruling in Carpenter. But the court affirmed the conviction again, this time under the good-faith exception.

Roth was joined by Chagares and Restrepo. Arguing counsel were Aidan O’Connor of Pashman Stein for the defendant and Norman Gross and Glenn Moramarco for the government.